This is an old story but there’s a chance you missed it so here I go again: To stop teenage loiterers, Welsh inventor Howard Stapleton invented a device that emits a very high frequency sound that older people simply cannot hear. The tone sounds like a mosquito buzzing in your ear and so was called The Mosquito. For more about the science and the story behind the invention, check out the very good “Wikipedia page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito on the subject.

Of course no good deed goes unpunished and the teens have struck back by using the same frequencies as alert tones on their mobile phones, thereby avoiding turning their phones off in class. A minor victory, but still an annoyance for teachers I’m sure.

If you feel like trying out the tones for yourself, the best place to download them seems to be “here”:http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/. You can download a whole range of frequencies and use the highest one you can hear. Be warned though, one day that frequency will fall away and you won’t hear your phone anymore.

There are some strange things out there in the world–furries, aibo robot dog pets–but this is almost too much. “Honey Dolls”:http://www.honeydolls.jp/en/main.html sex dolls have taken the inflatable gag gift and turned it into a highly lifelike, modern sex platform. It’s the male answer to the Rascally Rabbit and from my perspective, wtf? Aren’t there better uses for this engineering talent?

Most people would probably not actually follow link I told you to after a post like this so I’ve decided to reproduce a small portion of the “about section”:http://www.honeydolls.jp/en/about.html here.

It’s a miracle how social networking can lead to such wonderful treasures as those killer robot pictures above. I followed a link trail from one of my “Last.fm”:http://last.fm neighbours and somehow ended up at “LeSophie’s Flickr stream”:http://flickr.com/photos/25168809@N00/. The highlight of the stream was this “set”:http://flickr.com/photos/25168809@N00/sets/72157600033291647/ featuring retro robot pictures taken with a digital SLR through an old Kodak Dualflex camera viewfinder. That’s why each of these super-sweet robot pictures lies within that retro-looking frame and has a grain to it.

The LEGO-trading hotspot is “http://www.bricklink.com/”:http://www.bricklink.com/ Home (at the time of writing) to 64,918 registered members, this site hooks people up who are looking to trade, buy, sell, or discuss LEGO. Sets, parts, figurines, books, gear, catalogs, instructions, original boxes, or just unsorted lots of pieces. You name it and someone will be willing to trade it on Brick Link.

So we’re all big nerds right? Well it turns out that some of us are way cooler nerds than others and have managed to combine the childhood obsession with building things, Lego construction, with the more adult version, computer-building. I was hunting around for cool case ideas for a home theatre PC I’m thinking of building when I came across this cool Lego computer case by “Winston Chow”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~wchow/ at the University of Hawaii.